In the age of electronic document access and archiving, printer "abstinence" is more possible than ever. But when you absolutely must print something keep these tips in mind ...

Instead of printing documents to share with others, send them electronically as an MS Office document or PDF file.

What simpler way is there to save paper than to print more than one page on each sheet? This works out especially well for PowerPoint presentations, where the bullet points can usually be easily read even with the smaller view. In the print dialog, just choose 'Handouts" from the "Print What" drop down menu, and then choose the number of slides per page you want.

You'll find a similar setting for Microsoft Word's print dialog as well, where you can choose the number of pages per sheet.

You can also save some ink by printing only in greyscale.

Instead of printing information by the page, almost every application has a feature you might not have even noticed: the ability to print just a selection of text. This is especially helpful for printing a paragraph from a web page, or just a small section of a very long document or spreadsheet instead of throwing away the pages you don't need. This technique works in most major applications like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Microsoft Excel & Word. Simply select the portion of the document you want to print, and then choose the "Selection" option in the print dialog.